


family man

by lyricalprose (fairylights)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, single father AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-01-20
Packaged: 2018-01-09 08:03:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1143544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairylights/pseuds/lyricalprose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There’s only so much I can do on my own, and I just–" He looks down at the tabletop, where he’s absent-mindedly drawing looping patterns on the wood with idle fingers. "It’s hard to do this alone."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Based on this AU graphic by [stay-scintillating](http://stay-scintillating.tumblr.com) and prompted by [isilienelenihin](http://isilienelenihin.tumblr.com)'s tags.

Rose likes the _idea_ of a small town more than the reality.  
  
Sure, London isn’t a place she wants to be anymore — there’s too many bad memories. Rows with her mum and harsh words exchanged with Mickey and the way her life reads like a book about failure. But at least in the city there’s noise and bustle and life, always something going on.  
  
Gallifrey is sort of… _stuffy._ Still, and set in its ways, as if the town has collectively decided that participating in the linear progression of time is completely optional, rather than a condition of existence in the universe. Rose has only been in town for five days, and she’s already considering moving on to somewhere else - somewhere a bit less odd, and perhaps a bit less interested in the one thing in town that’s different.  
  
John and the children are an accident.  
  
Rose is walking out of the fifth shop on the high street that she’s been in today — the fifth one to gently but firmly tell her that they’re not hiring at the moment, so sorry. She’s feeling a bit panicky and desperate, fingering the shrinking wad of pound notes in her pocket that’s all she has left in the world as she slinks out of the shop and onto the street.  
  
It’s no surprise, then, that she doesn’t notice the approaching gaggle of children until it’s too late to avoid stumbling into them.  
  
"Hello," one of the girls says, bright and curious. She’s a slight little thing with brown hair and big eyes, wrapped up in a black bomber jacket covered in patches that’s far too big for her. "Who are you?"  
  
Rose stands there for a good half an hour, pinned to the sidewalk outside the Wild Endeavour outerwear shop by the attentions of the children. They pepper her with question after question, so talkative that Rose can’t even get a word in edgewise to ask where their parents are, but she’s amused despite herself. They’re clever and funny and she’s always liked children, always enjoyed looking after Bev’s little ones and her mum’s clients’ kids.  
  
When a wild-eyed man with disheveled brown hair comes careening around the nearest corner, visibly sagging with relief at the sight of the children, something like disappointment twists in her chest. This’ll be their father, and she won’t see them again. Rose chastises herself for getting too fond of them too quickly — she ought to have learned her lesson on that score long ago. If she had, she might not be in this mess at all.  
  
But the man — who’s really quite handsome, if a bit frazzled-looking — comes over and scoops up the girl in the bomber jacket and _thanks_ her for looking after his children. Then the other children promptly latch onto his legs, launching into a detailed explanation of how interesting Rose is and how there’s a lot more questions they’d like her to answer and how she’d just _love_ the treehouse, Dad, she would.  
  
"John Smith," the man says his name is, while he extricates a hand from the group of children vying for it and holds it out for Rose to shake. "Doctor John Smith."  
  
Somehow the introduction turns into a dinner invitation turns into another invitation to come round for dinner the next day.  
  
Once the children are put to bed after that second meal, John sits down across from her at the kitchen table and says that he needs help.  
  
"You’re brilliant with the kids," he says. "Better than any of the nannies or sitters I’ve had in to try and help with them. There’s only so much I can do on my own, and I just—" He looks down at the tabletop, where he’s absent-mindedly drawing looping patterns on the wood with idle fingers. "It’s hard to do this alone."  
  
"I haven’t got any references," Rose blurts out, even as she curses herself for the self-sabotage, for ruining her chance at a job that sounds so much more appealing than working in a shop. “I mean, I’ve helped out with kids before, and yours are lovely, really, but—” She twists her fingers and says, helplessly, “I haven’t even got my A-levels.”  
  
John smiles at her, then taps the side of his nose conspiratorially. “I won’t tell if you don’t,” he mock-whispers, and Rose can’t help grinning.  
  
For the most part, the children remain quite lovely, though they’re a handful in the way all children are — multiplied by four and made more complicated by the fact that they’re all very, very clever.  
  
Susan is precocious and sweet, constantly looking at the world with her eyes squinted and head tilted to the side, as if every sight and sound and smell is endlessly, impossibly fascinating. Tegan and Adric are at each others’ throats constantly, if only because they seem incapable of being apart at all — where one goes, the other inevitably follows.  
  
Ace calls her Blondie and scowls at her when she’s cross and routinely sets things on fire out in the back garden. But she also leaves scrawly seven-year-old crayon drawings on the desk in Rose’s room, and brings her frozen waffles on a paper plate when she’s feeling poorly, and comes to her as often as to her father when she needs a hug.  
  
Rose stops calling John ‘John’ after a while, as he claims he hates the name. ‘Doctor’ suits him much better anyways, and the nickname makes him smile in a way she’d once thought only the children could.  
  
In fact, he smiles more and more with every day that passes. Rose does, too. She smiles when the children laugh, and when their father tries to cook but fails horribly, and when all six of them go to the beach together one Saturday about two months after she’s moved in. She smiles at Susan’s precocious observations about the world, and at the way Tegan and Adric hide their affection with sniping, and at Ace’s own undisguised affection for her father, for fire and fireworks and anything that burns or goes boom, and lately for Rose herself.  
  
She smiles at John — one way when he’s looking, and another way entirely when he isn’t.  
  
She doesn’t realize that he’s doing the same.  
  
Rose knows it can’t last.  
  
(She wants it to last forever).


	2. one

Rose’s first day is the twenty-third of July, and she starts by ringing the bell of 44 Arcadia Close at seven-thirty sharp.  
  
She’s expecting John to answer the door, as he’s done on all the previous occasions she’s visited — so she’s a bit surprised when it’s Ace instead.  
  
The little girl, judging from the way her brown hair is mussed and frizzy, and from the way she’s dressed in bright red flannel pajamas and mismatched yellow and grey socks, has just gotten out of bed. In one hand she holds the sleeve of the bomber jacket Rose hasn’t ever seen her without, and the rest of the garment lays on the floor, clearly having been dragged along the corridor behind her.  
  
“Hello!” she chirps, sounding far more awake than Rose feels, even after the rather bracing early-morning walk across town from her bedsit. “We’re havin’ cornflakes. Would you like some?”  
  
“Er, sure,” Rose says unsteadily, and follows Ace and her dragged-along jacket down the hall and into the kitchen.  
  
The two older girls are already there. Susan is dressed and ready for the day, sitting at the table and sedately eating cornflakes out of a bright blue bowl. Tegan is dressed as well, if still rather sleep-rumpled, and in theory, is carefully pouring orange juice into a plastic cup. Most of the juice, however, seems to have ended up on the counter rather than in the cup. Rose immediately goes to assist with the delicate process, and Tegan makes a pleased little sound when together they manage to get the juice where it belongs.  
  
From upstairs, Rose can hear the sound of stomping feet and a high-pitched voice that must be Adric’s, along with the muted lower tones of John’s. “That the boys upstairs, then?” she asks the room at large.  
  
Ace, who has settled into the chair next to Susan’s at the kitchen table, nods and clutches her jacket to her chest the way Rose has seen other children do with a blanket, or a doll. “Daddy and Adric are havin’ a fight.”  
  
“Oh, they’re not fighting, sweetheart,” Susan says airily. “It’s a just a disagreement.”  
  
A loud _thump_ resounds through the ceiling from upstairs. “You sure about that?” Rose asks warily.  
  
Susan nods sagely. “It’s a regular disagreement. Father says that Adric ought to clean up his room, and Adric says that he shan’t, and no one can make him, but Father insists, and then Adric makes even _more_ of a mess, and no one is happy about any of it.”  
  
The boy in question tromps sulkily down the stairs a moment later, with his father on his heels.  
  
“Rose, good morning!” John says brightly, as he makes his way into the kitchen. He immediately starts rooting around in one of the cupboards, from which he retrieves a rather dented box of cornflakes and a stack of brightly colored plastic bowls.  
  
“You wouldn’t think,” he remarks conversationally, while lining the bowls up on the counter and starting to fill them with cereal, “that it would be like staging the invasion of bloody Normandy, getting a nine-year-old to clean his room.”  
  
“My mum always said it was like pullin’ teeth with me, when I was his age,” Rose says. “And not just cleanin’ my room, but anything I didn’t feel like doing.”  
  
John delivers the full bowls, along with a carton of milk and a few spoons, to the breakfast table before coming back to join her at the counter. “And that’s something you’ve grown out of, then?” he asks, in a tone that can’t seem to decide if it’s hopeful or sarcastic.  
  
Rose grins. “Nah, not really.”  
  
“Brilliant,” he drawls, while gesturing in her direction with the kettle he’s just picked up — a silent query about whether or not she’d like a cuppa. Rose shakes her head _no._ “Well then, you’ve got my mobile number, and the observatory’s number, for anything that might come up. Emergency numbers are here—” He pats a sheet of paper on the counter, next to the toaster. “—and Tegan’s friend Nyssa lives just across the way. Her dad works from home and he’s a friend, if it happens that you need something right away.”  
  
“Right,” Rose echoes, and John nods stiffly, looking back and forth between her and the children at the table, all of whom, apart from the still-sulking Adric, seem to have tucked into their cornflakes with gusto.  
  
“I guess I’ll just…be going, then,” he says lamely, and Rose finds herself smiling at his obvious hesitance to leave.  
  
“We’ll be all right, you know,” she reminds him gently. “You’re only a phone call away.”  
  
John seems to gather himself, then, and he nods tightly in her direction before saying, in a mock-military voice, “Right. Best of luck, then, soldier.”  
  
Rose salutes, mock-seriously, and then hides her helpless laughter behind her hand while John goose-steps exaggeratedly over to the breakfast table, to say good-bye to the children.  
  
\---  
  
As much as she enjoys the children, Rose had honestly expected the day to drag on a bit.  
  
She had been sure that over eight hours with the four of them would eventually have her looking at the clock, wondering when it was time for John to come home and offer a break. But, in fact, by the time John is home at half five she’s actually surprised that it’s _been_ that long — and more than a bit sad to think about having to go back to the bedsit she’s renting. The bedsit, after all, is little more than a tiny little windowless room, with no heat and a paper-thin mattress. The air smells stale and damp, like an attic full of wet cardboard boxes, and perhaps worst of all, it is terribly, oppressively _quiet._  
  
But when Rose is getting ready to leave for the day, John stops her in the hall and stammers, “You’re welcome to stay. For dinner, you know.” He rocks back and forth on his heels while she’s making to grab her coat from the hook by the door — rubbing one hand across the back of his neck while he buries the other deep in a trouser pocket. “We’ve hardly got anything in, so I can’t promise the best meal you’ve ever had, but if you’ve got no plans—”  
  
There’s nothing in back at her bedsit ,except a few cans of beans and a pint of milk that Rose is pretty sure is about to go off. She’d been thinking about stopping by the chippy round the corner from her place on the way back, actually, but there’s still the problem of her dwindling cash supply, and that won’t be fixed until her first paycheck from John at the end of the month.  
  
She doesn’t think twice before saying _yes._  
  
Dinner is, in fact, nothing special — slightly overcooked pasta with tomato sauce from a jar — but it’s hot and fresh-made, and that’s more than can be said for most of the meals Rose has eaten in the last month or so. The children moan their way through helping with the washing up, and after a bit of protesting over bedtimes and pajamas and whether or not one really needs to brush one’s teeth, they’re eventually packed off to bed. Susan curls up with a book she’s been reading all day, something thick and dusty that Rose never would have dreamed of picking up at her age, and Rose closes the door on Tegan and Adric whispering noisily at each other in the room that they share.   
  
Ace insists on a story before going to sleep, and Rose is not so much invited as _ordered_ to participate in a rendition of _The Twelve Dancing Princesses_ that, inexplicably, seems to involve more aliens and explosions than princesses or dancing. Ace, however, is beyond delighted with it.   
  
She’s back downstairs, heading towards the entryway to get her coat and trainers, when John asks, “Did you want a cuppa, or something?”  
  
Rose turns in the corridor to look back at him, and he blurts out, “Before you go, I mean.”  
  
She hesitates for a moment, this time, but her answer is still _yes._  
  
\---  
  
“Ace said something, this afternoon,” Rose says a few minutes later, while John is fixing the tea — fiddling with the kettle, getting the milk out, finding clean spoons and mugs in the pile of drying dishes left over from dinner.  
  
He makes a humming noise of acknowledgment, and Rose takes a deep breath before continuing, not quite sure how best to phrase what she’s wondering. “She said — and I don’t want to pry, I really don’t, but — she said she was adopted.”   
  
John’s shoulders stiffen, and his hand stills on the spoon he’s holding, frozen in the act of stirring tea and milk together. For a moment Rose is sure she shouldn’t have said anything. But then his shoulders relax and the spoon starts moving again, and when he turns to bring both mugs of tea — milk and sugar for her, just milk for him — over to the table, he’s smiling.  
  
“Susan is the only one who’s mine,” he says softly, after settling in at the table. “Biologically, I mean. They’re all—” He sniffs and looks down at his mug for a moment before continuing. “Anyways, the younger ones are adopted.”  
  
Rose nods. She’d wondered a bit, honestly — the children don’t really look anything alike, apart from all having brown hair. Now that she compares Susan’s features with John’s, she can see some similarities that aren’t there in the others — a similar slanting smile, a particular shade of brown in their eyes. “Why?” she blurts out, before she can think better of the question. “If you don’t mind me asking,” she adds hastily, when John quirks an eyebrow at her.  
  
“It was…sort of an accident. All of it, really. All of them.” He chuckles. “My whole life sort of is, when you get right down to it.”  
  
“My late wife,” he starts to say, and his voice goes a bit hoarse on the last word, “she and I were friends. Great friends.” John laughs again. “Friends who shagged now and then — as it goes, you know. We both grew up here, and we were neither of us keen on coming back, or settling down. So we had good fun, but it was never anything serious. Neither of us went in for that sort of thing, really. She wanted to go into politics, and I wanted to sit for my doctorate in astrophysics.”  
  
“Let me guess,” Rose says. “Then she got pregnant?”  
  
John smiles wryly. “Old story, I know. Believe me, we weren’t especially proud to be carrying on that particular cliché.” His smile softens, a bit, into something more sincere. “So that was Susan, then. There we were, me in graduate school and Romana barely out of uni at all, not even properly together and with a baby on the way.”  
  
“So what did you do?”  
  
“We did what we always said we’d never do.” He sighs, and it’s an exhausted sort of sound. “We came home.”  
  
John runs a finger around the rim of his mug. “I sat for my doctorate at the closest university that’d have me. And we got married, because it seemed the thing to do when you’re having a child with someone.”  
  
“Not because you loved her?” Rose asks. She regrets the question not two seconds after it’s escaped her mouth, because all of a sudden John’s face shutters, his eyes leaving hers and skittering across the tabletop.  
  
“I loved her,” he says, after a long, still moment. “Perhaps not as much as she deserved, but — I loved her.” He sniffs, and looks down into the tea that he’s barely touched. “Love her still, I suppose.”  
  
“Has it—” Rose wavers in the middle of the question, vacillating between wanting to know the answer and not wanting to be insensitive. “Has it been a long time, then?” she finally manages to ask. “Since she died?”  
  
“Two and a half years,” John mumbles, as he keeps on tracing the rim of his mug — circling around and around, clockwise and then counter-clockwise. “Sometimes it seems like a lot longer. Other times I could swear it’s hardly been a week.”  
  
Rose is searching for something to say, in response to the look of quiet gloom on John’s face, when all of a sudden he blurts out, “And I’m no _good_ at this.”  
  
“I mean, I was always a rubbish father,” he continues haltingly, as Rose looks askance at him. “Especially when Susan was young. Never at home, always in the library working on my dissertation, or in the classroom or the lab.”  
  
He takes a hasty sip of tea and grimaces. “Romana, though, she was a brilliant mum.” John’s expression goes soft. “Just — _brilliant._ Always knew what needed doing, or saying, or patching up. Once I’d got my doctorate and then the research position at the observatory — once we’d got this house — she started working with the fostering agency, doing short-term placements for kids who needed a place to stay.”  
  
He takes another overlarge gulp of tea, as if looking for an excuse to pause. “Like I said, she wanted to go into politics, when we were at uni together — was going to move to London after school, get a job working for an MP, or something. She’d have been brilliant at it, too.”  
  
“And she gave it up?” John nods, and Rose tries to fathom it — having your future all planned out like that, and then just…letting it go.  
  
She’d made hazy plans of her own once, doodled in the margins of her fourteen-year-old mind. A-levels in French and English and art, the only subjects she’d ever really liked, maybe going off to uni somewhere she’d never been, somewhere a bit new and exciting. They hadn’t been anything solid, anything tangible, and she’d given them up easily enough — tossed them away far too quickly, in fact, now that she thinks about it with an older, clearer head — but the memory of doing that still tastes bitter in her mouth.  
  
“I tried to convince her not to,” John says, with an air of resignation. “I could’ve sat for my doctorate at half a dozen different universities in London — and honestly, if it had been all up to me, I’d probably have waited tables rather than come back here. But she was always the practical one, between the two of us, and there was no changing her mind, not once it was made up. We couldn’t afford to move to London, not with a baby and me still in school, and we were determined to make a go of it — the whole co-parenting thing, you know.” He barks out a rough little laugh — a dark, harsh sort of sound that makes Rose inexplicably sad. “Not that I turned out to be much good at the last bit.”  
  
They both fall silent for a moment, taking turns sipping at their tea, in an effort to excuse the lull, before John continues. “I think she might’ve gotten back into it — politics, I mean — once the kids were a bit older, but—” He trails off, for a moment, before righting himself. “Anyways, she couldn’t run an MP’s office, not from here, but she could run a house full of children — ran the place like it was a bloody national campaign. Tegan and Adric came when Susan was six or so, and it was supposed to be temporary, just like all the others before them, but they just—”  
  
“Stayed?”  
  
John smiles, and it’s small but genuine. “Yeah, suppose so. Ace, too.”  
  
Then the brief, beautiful smile drops clean off his face as he says, “Ace barely remembers her. Romana, I mean. She wasn’t even five yet, when she died. She hadn’t—” He clears his throat before finishing. “Ace hadn’t even been with us two years.”  
  
Rose thinks, later that night when she’s walking back to her bedsit, that grabbing his hand — not the one that’s been tracing idle circles around the rim of his mug, but the one that’s resting on the table, clenching and unclenching around nothing — might have been a bit presumptuous.  
  
But John’s fingers close around hers like they’ve been holding hands for years — like it’s something he expected, something he’s been waiting for.  
  
“You’re not rubbish, you know,” she says quietly, looking at their hands rather than his face. “I’ve seen you, with them, and you’re — you’re brilliant too. At the dad thing.”  
  
He squeezes her fingers, either out of gratitude or acknowledgment — Rose isn’t sure which. “I’m not,” he mumbles. “I mean, I _am._ Rubbish, that is. But thanks, for saying otherwise.”  
  
She wants to argue the point, a bit, but for now Rose settles for squeezing his hand back.  
  
\---  
  
It is eight days — and at least twice as many cups of tea — before John says, “I have a spare room, you know.”   
  
Rose looks curiously at him, and John does that awkward, visible swallow that he seems to tend towards when he’s nervous. “Upstairs,” he offers, after a stale moment of silence. “It’s sort of a catch-all, right now, for things we’ve not decided what to do with, but there’s a bed, and a desk, and I’m sure it’d be a lot easier for you, not having to trek across town every morning — and it’s sort of the done thing, isn’t it, with au pairs? But if you’d be uncomfortable, moving in like that, I’d—”  
  
“I’ll take it,” Rose says, cutting him off mid-ramble, and his answer is a smile.


End file.
